There is nothing complicated about Palestine

September 14, 2025

If you are not using the words apartheid or genocide in the same sentence when talking about Israel and Palestine then you are in denial. This video, Why I can no longer support Casey Neistat - YouTube from north star radio segues to a section from Michael Brooks talking about what is happening.

I love when people call the Israel Palestine conflict a complicated situation. There’s nothing complicated about it. You know what? Instead of me explaining it, here’s the late great Michael Brooks giving his explanation for the simplicity of the conflict.

INTERVIEWER

As someone with a Jewish background, how do you feel about Bernie’s plan for Israel, especially as someone concerned with foreign policy?

MICHAEL BROOKS

I love it. It’s absolutely necessary. My Jewish values teach me to oppose apartheid.

INTERVIEWER

Are you not concerned about the binary between either condemning Israel entirely, also a stance that a lot of strong and notorious anti-semitic people agree with versus seeing this as more of a complex issue, where it is wrong what’s going on and there’s also a way to do this that Israel still exists and is supported?

MICHAEL BROOKS

So it’s not a complex issue. That’s the big thing. It’s super simple. There’s one group that has enormous power. It’s the most powerful country in the Middle East. It’s backed by the United States. It acts on another population of people with total impunity and is never held accountable for anything. So there’s no symmetry in the relationship. Period.

And just as like a thought experiment, IDW people, if we know that if somehow a population of Jewish refugees ended up in West Bank in Gaza and an Arabic government in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv had an open air prison in in what you know, Jewish Gaza, which they bombed the white phosphorus, they killed civilians indiscriminately in. They had no uh provisions for medicine. They had an embargo that blocked food, that the electricity wasn’t running, that there was an over 48% unemployment rate, life expectancy and malnutrition. Statistics were horrifying. The uh one of the major uh policy makers in this hypothetical Arabic Palestinian state said, “We need to put those Jews on a diet.” In the West Bank, there was another Jewish area where there was a little bit more autonomy, but there was regular Arabic settlements where they pulled up the Jewish farmers foods. They terrorized them with rocks. The security forces broke children’s bones and they couldn’t drive their own roads. We’d all have no problem understanding what that was. So there’s nothing complex about it.